Service was one of the main characteristics of the European Marriage Pattern in pre-industrial western Europe. During this stage of the life cycle adolescents could acquire the material assets and skills that were required to marry and start an independent household. Whilst in service, servants...

Is it better to apply effort to increase personal consumption, or control what one wants? The model presented here provides a characterization of demand for self control, namely, its responsiveness to price and risk. Unlike most other models of self control, the model does not identify self...

This paper deals with optimal income taxation based on a model with households where men and women allocate their time between market work and household production, and where households differ depending on which spouse has comparative advantage in market work. The purpose is to analyze the tax...

This paper deals with optimal income taxation based on a model with households where men and women allocate their time between market work and household production, and where households di¤er depending on which spouse has comparative advantage in market work. The purpose is to analyze the tax...

We explore women's preferences for each of five work options when they have young children, specifically: staying home without a job, working part-time, a part-time paid job that can done from home, working full-time, and a full-time job that can be done from home. Using a nationally...

Much is known about men's actual labor force participation but little about their preferences. The vast majority work actually full-time outside the home when they have young children. But data from a large, representative national sample of Australia show that most would prefer to be at home,...

People have mixed feelings about paid employment for mothers with young children. This might reflect opposition to women's work per se or, instead, fear that children are harmed by mothers' absence from the home. To find out, we developed new questions differentiating support for or opposition...

The conflict between family life and paid work outside the home creates difficult trade-offs. In most developed nations, few men or women think that mothers with young children are best off working full-time. But another alternative reduces the conflict: paid work at home. Data from a large...

Happiness research in economics takes reported subjective well-being as a proxy measure for utility and has already provided many interesting insights about human well-being and its determinants. We argue that future research on happiness in economics has a lot of potential, but that it needs to...

Several papers in the literature on intra-household allocation have suggested that various household ‘outcomes’, such as demands, saving, child health etc., depend on the distribution of income within the household. Implicit in these analyses is that a higher share of household income for...